Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Earthquakes are like lightning

This pulse of bird droppings happened 15 minutes before the earthquake. I've always wondered how the fault goes from static to dynamic friction, and follows a plane. Now I know, it's like lightning making a plasma channel before it strikes. Only in this case it is the final movements before dynamic friction, the whole plane slides slowly to the critical displacement. At that point, dilation stops it, and it is in 'ready' mode for 15 minutes. Then, boom. This must give a magnetic signal that we can't pick up over the noise of everyday thunderstorms. But birds can. It's like picking up a conversation in a loud room, if somebody says your name. We just have to figure it out.

ps. if this gives a subtle signal, then the same signal (up by a factor of 10) hits the birds when the fault moves. That's probably why they fly, they are about to get a slamming headache.

pps. This could be solved by proposing the positive hypothesis. Then you need a lot of EM and magnetic measurements, none in Ohio. Then you can hit it two ways: Model a current spreading out on the fault and calculate the magnetic signal. Then extract the theoretical signal from the noise. Or you could feed the signals to a neural machine, and treat it like voice recognition. You'll never see a clean signal, but the birds know.